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It's interesting and probably important how testy our normally good-natured list gets on the subject of Tolkien. One can feel the contributors restraining themselves in stating their positions. I've loved Tolkien's book ever since it came out in the U.S., when I was twelve and my first impulse was to rush to his defense as an extraordinary prose stylist (Star Wars indeed! Beth) and world-maker. But I think you either like Tolkien or you don't and you can't be argued into enjoyment.
It's more interesting, I think, to consider why we get so worked up about a great minor writer of the twentieth century. Do we get mad when we hear Tennyson depreciated? He wasn't much good on women, either. I think that one reason is the way in which romance tends to be discounted in the U.S. (Ursula Le Guin has an interesting essay on this "Why Americans are Afraid of Dragons" or something like that in her collection, The Language of the Night). Many serious critics have no ear for the ways that romance means, and put down both Spenser and Tolkien because they don't follow the conventions of realism in characterization. As a result we have to argue for the seriousness as well as the pleasure involved in reading a poet who writes about knights, witches and dragons.
At the same time many of the enthusiastic defenders of fantasyŻour studentsŻare equally undiscriminating and this makes usŻor at least meŻuneasy. They don't see all that great a difference between Spenser and Tolkien and indeed between Tolkien and Robert Jordan. I think that part of the need to draw lines in the sand has to do with the sense that books in which we're heavily invested are coming under attack by being confused with books that are harder to defend. And that in a climate dismissive of much that we give our lives to. Bill Oram
>>> [log in to unmask] 02/17/04 11:51PM >>>
At 3:03 PM -0500 2/17/04, Beth Quitslund wrote:
>Studying Tolkien's writing for its own sake--for the kinds of
>reasons that many of us study Spenser, historicist, theoretical, and
>cultural studies apparatus notwithstanding--seems little different to me
>from studying *Star Wars* for its verbal genius. On the other hand,
>studying Tolkien's writing the way that critics of 20th-c. literature used
>to study Madonna might yield something.
This was pretty much Tolkien's own view about English literature
after Chaucer; people could read that sort of thing at home in the
bathtub without any special instruction and it was silly to make a
university subject out of it. In other words, he was a proponent of
the "lang" side in the lang vs. lit controversies of the Oxford
English department. It's ironic given his status as the god of faux
medievalism that he apparently didn't like Spenser because of the
faux Middle English.
But the wittiest thing I've ever heard on this topic is Anne
Prescott's comment (in I forget what context): "Spenser is the rich
man's Tolkien."
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________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[log in to unmask]
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
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